On Jul 12, 2011, at 7:34 PM, Jack Stewart wrote:
> I am about to select a version management system for my Mac and used for
> version management of web site pages and database management systems. I've
> bee staring at CVS, Subversion and Perforce. There are probably others.
Talking about version control systems can be like talking about religion or
politics. People tend to have opinions, strong opinions, and their experience
tends to center around systems they've used extensively, mixed with heresay
about products they haven't used.
I think you owe it to yourself to give a few of the top tools a try - even if
it's just a matter of checking out source from public repositories to build a
project. Preferably, though, a thorough test of versioning a website and
stepping through what a likely workflow would look like with the various tools.
I feel that everyone should have experience with a traditionally centralized
version control system and with a distributed system - so that they can be
familiar with the strengths and drawbacks of each and, yes, develop an opinion
on where they would gravitate toward one over the other in future situations as
they arrive. The systems I'd recommend looking at have already been mentioned:
Centralized:
- Subversion
- Perforce
Distributed:
- Git
- Mercurial
Personally, my preferences are Perforce and Mercurial. But I recommend playing
around with the systems and getting a sense for how they store versioned files,
where state is maintained. Whether, for instance, perforce's default of locking
files that aren't marked for editing stands more or less in the way than all
the dot-directories that subversion scatters through your working directories.
Whether the subversion/perforce approach of using paths to separate branches
(as you might separate versions on a file server) is harder to keep straight
than the distributed approach that git and mercurial take. And, though it's
likely you'll be leveraging commandline tools for much of the work, do a survey
of the graphical tools - including, of course, the BBEdit integration - for
working with the repository, merging files together and resolving conflicts
between revisions. It's also worth taking a look at github and bitbucket to see
what they offer.
-Charles
[email protected]
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